legends · 4 min read ·
Between Floors
A lift engineer rides a car that stops between floors ten and eleven at a corridor he has never been asked to service.
I service lifts for a living, and the first thing to say about lifts is that they are boring and that this is the highest compliment. A good lift is one that no one thinks about. I have spent twenty years making sure of it.
The Harrow Building has eleven floors. I know this the way I know my own phone number. It has two passenger lifts and a goods lift, all three Swedish, all three kept to a standard that I am quietly vain about. In the machine room on the roof I have my own stool.
On the Thursday in question I was called because the north car had been "skipping." That was the word on the ticket. I rode it twice, top to bottom and back, and it did not skip. It stopped at every floor, doors opened and closed, the display counted as it should. I sat in the car with the panel off and my hand on the controller and listened to it climb. Nothing. A good lift.
Then, on the way up, between the tenth and the eleventh, the car stopped.
It was not a fault stop. A fault stop has a sound. This was a soft stop, the way a car stops when the controller has been told to stop, and the display said a number I had not seen on that panel before. Twelve.
The doors opened. I want to be exact about this. The building has eleven floors, the shaft has eleven landings, I have been in the pit and I have been on top of the car and I have counted every landing door. Yet the doors opened and in front of me was a corridor, carpeted in a grey I did not recognise, lit by long strip lights, and at the end of it, a window. It was dusk outside. At the time it was ten past two in the afternoon.
I did not step out. I will say that for myself. I held the open-door button down and leaned out far enough to see that the corridor had doors on both sides, numbered, and that the numbers were in a typeface that the building does not use. There was a smell of warm dust, the smell of heating that has just come on after the summer.
Somebody was walking towards me from the far end. I could not see a face. I could see a coat and the shape of a person who walks with a certain care, and I could see that whoever it was had a clipboard.
I let go of the button. The doors closed. The display went to eleven and the car carried on to the top and opened onto the ordinary eleventh floor, the ordinary reception, and a woman with a sandwich who gave me the look people give a man in overalls.
I rode the car all afternoon. It never went to twelve again. I ran the diagnostics and the controller log showed no floor beyond eleven, and no stop between ten and eleven, and no period of time unaccounted for. It was a perfectly clean log.
I filed the ticket. *Unable to reproduce. Car operating normally.* That is what one writes.
But I went back the next week, on my own time, and the week after. I did not ride the north car. I stood in the lobby and I watched the display over the door, the little illuminated numerals, and I noticed something about the people who used it. About one in thirty of them did something that I would call a hesitation. They would get in, reach for the panel, and stop with a finger over it. Then they would press eleven or six or whatever they meant. But I saw it, and I had been twenty years watching men press buttons.
I asked one of them, a young man in a lanyard, what had made him stop.
"Is there a twelve?" he said. "I could have sworn there was a twelve. I've worked here four years and I always have a feeling I'm going to get out on twelve."
I went to the panel myself afterwards and looked at the buttons. Eleven. A blank brass plate below it where I had always assumed a decorative spacer was. I took a screwdriver to the plate, which I am not supposed to do, and lifted it off.
There was a button underneath. Unlit, unlabelled, worn smooth by a thumb that had pressed it a very great number of times.
I put the plate back. I did what I advise customers to do with anything they cannot explain: I wrote it up and I told the managing agent that the car was in good order. And it is. It has not skipped since.
I only mention that last week I was riding up to check the overspeed governor and, between ten and eleven, the car slowed, and I felt the little lift in the stomach that comes before a stop. I pressed the open-door button before the doors could open. I counted to thirty. The display read eleven the whole time. I do not know what I am afraid of, but I know it is polite and that it carries a clipboard, and that on the day it stops being polite, I would not want to be in the car.